Dogs, Garden, GeekWorld, Memories

Reaching Back in Time

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Beltane                      Waxing Hungry Ghost Moon

We’re only a week away from the summer solstice, but you could not tell it from our current weather.  We’ve had a cool, rainy streak that has made work outside appealing.  It’s also given the weeds considerable encouragement.

The internet allows a look-up phenom that you’ve no doubt experienced at least once.  An e-mail shows up from someone in the way back long ago.  A posting of Facebook.  A comment on  your blog.  I’ve had a few.  Got one Friday from a high school girlfriend, a relationship that meant something to me.  It was nice to hear from her since we stopped seeing each other my senior year and went our separate ways.  E-mail is a great medium for this kind of oh my it’s been so long reacquaintance.  Neutral. Not time sensitive.

Vega has a new gorilla that she carries with her in the house where ever she goes.  It makes a noise and whenever she triggers it, she scoots off for a safe area, not quite sure.  Rigel has no interest in toys, she enjoys the thrill of the hunt, the joy of escape.  Which she did yesterday.  Again.  She got out through a hole under the fence I wouldn’t have thought big enough for her.  I’ve hardened the lower edge of the fence line over the years, but this spot had rotted out.  I found her collar hooked on a log where she’d crawled under the chain-link.  She does not go over the fence anymore.  Electricity.

Kate’s on a countdown for a new hip.  June 30th.  She commented on a discogram yesterday (this involves a probing needle that injects dye between the discs to get a contrast image), “I’m a Norwegian, a stoic and a woman and still I had copious tears.”  She can bear it, but she pays a price.  She also observed, by the way, that I will never, ever have a discogram.  She’s right on that one.

Not a bee day today.  Wednesday looks like the day for the hive inspection.

Family, Garden, Humanities

A Pruning Dervish

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Beltane                            New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

Kate became a pruning dervish this morning, clearing a pathway to our front door, giving the draping yew apruned-old-salvia hair-cut and generally wrecking havoc with weeds and overgrown shrubs.  Yeah.  Now I’m moving the detritus to a resting place where the grape vines, columbine and raspberries will grow over it and make it a productive part of our property instead of a house-hider.

I have gotten through the perfect passive system for all verbs, interrogative pronouns, interrogative adjectives and a new  vocabulary.  Later on we’re going to skype with the kids and the grandkids.  How Sunday’s going around here.

Aging, Humanities

Globe Circling Teens

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Beltane                                          New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

A Latin day except for periods outside.  I’ve found doing the chapter of Wheelock that’s next up on Sunday, at least most of it, lets me finish the chapter on Monday or at the latest Tuesday morning.  That gives me Tuesday and Wednesday to work on Ovid.  My tutor says I have to be very mechanical at this point, hunt for the subject, object, verb first.  I have a tendency to get lost looking for meaning in all the wrong places.  Just like life.

Abby Sunderland, the 16 year old girl who would circle the globe, had her main mast broken in nasty weather.  The South Indian ocean, which gets a lot of its weather from the interaction of the cold Antarctic air with the warmer air from the tropics has a nasty reputation among sailors.  Jessica Watson, the 16 year girl who did circle the world, passed through the Southern Indian Ocean about a month ago and she had rough weather there, too.

To say that 16 year olds should not be allowed to do this kind of thing is stupid.  Perhaps most 16 year olds, or nearly all 16 year olds, but you have to leave open the option for the prodigy or the merely very competent.  Jessica Watson makes the case.  So does Abby Sunderland.  Having a mast broken would put a stop to any sailor, no matter their level of experience.  Abby did not die.  She had emergency gear and plans.  They all worked.

Might there be a tragedy someday?  Yes, I imagine there will.  Probably already has been.  Alexander the Great was 20 when he set out to conquer the known world.  33 when he died.  How many of today’s risk averse adults would allow their children to set out, even at 20, to conquer the world?  I thought so.

My point is that teen agers are individuals, not cookie-cutter imitations of each other.  Over much of history teen agers had the bulk of the babies, fought the wars and were even leaders of their families and communities.  Our complex cultural environment now trends toward longer and longer periods of pre-adulthood, an article in the paper today said many Gen-Xers and Millenials will not marry, have kids or get started in their careers until they are in their late 20’s or early 30’s.

It does not change the fact that some teen agers–you know who you are–have the capacity to handle individual efforts beyond even most adults.

Garden

A Garden Morning

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Beltane                                   New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

The potatoes have mounds around the growing plants and the hilled up earth from their trenches has leveled out.  The bush beans I planted there last week 06-05-10_garden_herb-spiral-670have begun to germinate and I plan to plant more bush beans tomorrow if the weather is ok.

While checking fruit on our trees, I ended up weeding the blueberries, too.  The clover is exuberant, mostly a happy addition to our orchard, but overwhelming in the blueberry patch.  We do have apples and cherries and currants, but I could find no pears.  Our production will at least double this year, maybe more.  I counted six apples and several, say 8, cherries.  The currants have experienced substantial predation, by birds, I think.

I mounded earth around the growing leeks, too, to blanch the stems.   The garlic, which grows near the leeks, looked ready to harvest, but when I pulled a few out of the ground, they looked like they had a ways to go.  I hung the five I dug from a bamboo pole in the honey house.

Kate’s begun weeding and that helps a lot.  Keeping the bees, the vegetables, the orchard and the flowers in good shape requires attending to the plants we have, doing things like mounding the potatoes and the leeks, checking the garlic, watching for disease and insects, taking action if a plant seems to be in distress, replanting if, as in the instance of the carrots, germination is low.  Though weeding is an important, very important maintenance action, it doesn’t involve direct plant care which is what I enjoy.  I’m glad to have Kate back at the weeding.  She’s also our pruner and she has begun to recover our front sidewalk.

Then it rained.

Dogs, Politics

Friday, Friday

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Beltane                                         New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

Errands this morning to the pharmacy, Office Max and Pet Smart.  Our Vega loves her toys and is a strong vegaoutsidefencechewer.  Even buying the ones rated For Power Chewers she eventually gnaws the damned things apart.  But she has such joy with them.  Throwing them in the air, carrying them from place to place, sleeping with them.

(Vega east of eden)

Back home for a Sierra Club call about some structural changes in the Chapter’s legislative process, then a nap.  If I were more energetic today, I’d put in some time weeding, but I’m not feelin’ it.

The nurse’s strike did not impact Urgent Care last night, but even if it had, this house supports the nurses.

Aging, Sport

The Celtics

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Beltane                                                Waning Planting Moon

Just watched the Celtics beat the Lakers.  A good run in the fourth quarter by the Celtic bench, no, make that a great run, to take the Celtics from four points down to as much as 11 up.  I don’t watch much basketball anymore, my street cred as a Hoosier slipping further and further away.  This finish made me remember why basketball is such a dynamic, fun to watch game, even on television.

The only thing you don’t get on television is the size, the astonishing size of the players.  Like the pro football players these folks are in a class of humans that occupy the extreme of the bell curve in height, weight and athletic ability.  Us 5 feet 7 inch guys literally don’t measure up.

It’s been a long time since I watched any sport other than football.  Like tonight I’ll catch part of a basketball game, the end of the 500 mile race, maybe one of the triple crown races with Kate.  During the winter olympics I watch a few things like the skiing events and the luge, maybe something else like biathlon and in the summer olympics I like track and field events like the dashes, the shorter distance races, long jump, pole vault, sometimes the basketball, other than those not much.

This is a culture change from my Indiana days when I used to watch basketball, especially college basketball, baseball, racing.  Other things to do.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics, Writing

The Sublime Gift

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Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

” Life can’t bring you the sublime gift it has for you until you interrupt your pursuit of a mediocre gift.”

Woolly brother Tom Crane sent this to me.  It took me back to my recent post about Siah Armajani and his personal commitment to staying within his skill set.  When I worked for the church in the now long ago past, I had a boss, Bob Lucas, a good man, who had several sayings he used a lot.  One of them was also similar in spirit, “Don’t major in the minors.”

Stop focusing on the small things you might be able to do well to the exclusion of being challenged by the prajaparmita400serious, important matters.  Stop your pursuit of a mediocre gift.   The tendency to judge our worth by the accumulation of things–a he who dies with the best toys wins mentality–presses us to pursue money or status, power, with all of our gifts.  You may be lucky enough, as Kate is, to use your gifts in a pursuit that also makes decent money; on the other hand if  your work life and your heart life don’t match up, you risk spending your valuable work time and energy in pursuit of a mediocre gift, hiding the sublime one from view.

This is not an affair without risk.  Twenty years ago I shifted from the ministry which had grown cramped and hypocritical for me to what I thought was my sublime gift, writing.  At least from the perspective of public recognition I have to say it has not manifested itself as my sublime gift.  Instead, it allowed me to push away from the confinement of Christian thought and faith.  A gift in itself for me.  The move away from the ministry also opened a space for what I hunch may be my sublime gift, an intense engagement with the world of plants and animals.

This is the world of the yellow and black garden spider my mother and I watched out our kitchen window over 50+ years ago.  It is the world of flowers and vegetables, soil and trees, dogs and bees, the great wheel and the great work.  It is a world bounded not by political borders but connected through the movement of weather, the migration of the birds and the Monarch butterflies.  It is a world that appears here, on our property, as a particular instance of a global network, the interwoven, interlaced, interdependent web of life and its everyday contact with the its necessary partner, the inanimate.

So, you see, the real message is stop pursuit of the mediocre gift.  After that, the sublime gift life has to offer may then begin to pursue you.

Art and Culture

And some more misc.

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Beltane                                    Waning Planting Moon

A fine tribute to Michele Yates.  Merritt did a tour of various galleries and played music appropriate to the era.  Plain chant in the medieval and renaissance gallery, madrigals and recorder music in the Tudor Room, a movement from a Mozart concerto next to Ganymede and the Eagle, romantic music by Mendelssohn  in the large gallery with Theseus and the Centaur, Delacroix’s Fanatics of Tangiers and Silenus, ending with Debussy in the impressionist gallery.

Merritt is a musicologist by profession, now retired, and has a keen appreciation for the interplay between the musical and visual arts.

Today’s a bit fragmented in that I took my nap at 11:00 am.  Now I’m going to go work on some more Ovid.

General

Misc.

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Beltane                          Waning Planting Moon

A quick grocery run.  I do two kind of trips to the grocery store.  One is an urgent care run which picks up items which we need NOW.  The other is a more leisurely and comprehensive trip designed to get food for specific recipes, stock up on things like milk, cereal, vegetables and fruit.  This was an urgent care trip.

All the while I’m listening to lecture 72 out of an 84 lecture course on Great Minds of the Western Tradition. This is all ground I’ve covered before, but this course presents it from a different angle.  Today the lecture was about structuralism, a vastly influential thought system that originated in the work of a pioneering linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, and received elaboration from a name more familiar to me, Claude Levi Strauss, an anthropologist.

At 1 pm we have a tour honoring Michele Yates, our departing buddy from docent class 2005.  It’s also an event for the docent discussion group.

Aging, Bees, Family, Humanities

Bees, Latin and Learning

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Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

A sleepy, rainy day.  After a very busy Monday, I settled into the Latin and finished off chapter 18 in Wheelock.  It took most of the day with a couple of instances (well, maybe more than a couple) of head scratching and paging back and forth to find out what I was not understanding.

Kate and I have settled into our familiar and comfortable routines.  She went out today to have her nails done while I labored in the scriptorium.

Tonight is the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association meeting at Borlaug Hall.  I feel both mildly competent and wildly confused with both the beekeeping and the Latin.  I’ve now overwintered a package of bees, made a divide into parent and child colonies and hived a package of bees by myself.  The smoker stays lit for the duration of my work in the bee yard and I have not repeated my various stings event.

Yet.  When I pulled the frames from the parent colony and moved one to the package colony and one to the divide, I felt very unsure of what I had done.  Still am.  I look at the frames and I can tell the pollen filled cells from the honey filled cells.  I know what larvae look like and I can identify a drone cell and its unique domed structure.  Queen or swarm cells are also apparent to me.  Even so, I cannot tell healthy frames from troubled ones.

I get addled about what I’m doing because of the bees buzzing around and forget what I’ve done like I did yesterday with the reverse of the parent colony.  I have no clue about what to do with the honey the bees are making, I’m just imagining that I’ll learn about that in time to do it.

In the Latin I miss obvious things and pick up on some obscure ones like word meanings, verb forms and case endings for nouns and adjectives.  I have two index cards filled with words, mostly adverbs and conjunctions, that I can’t remember.   I puzzle over a translation, no luck, no luck, no luck, then a bright light.  Ah ha.

Learning has this daunting vulnerability to it.  Without placing yourself in a situation where you don’t know what you’re your doing, you cannot learn.  It keeps a guy humble that’s for sure.